PizzaExpress Club: Transforming the customer journey

PizzaExpress, the nation’s most iconic pizzeria brand which is renowned for serving world-famous pizza and delicious Dough Balls, initiated a strategic partnership with Mapp to set stage for a transformative journey in customer engagement. The result? A pioneering industry-leading loyalty programme, resulting in PizzaExpress delivering a personalized customer journey each and every time – whether customers are dining in a restaurant, ordering via PizzaExpress Delivers from the comfort of their home, collecting their favourite pizza directly from a pizzeria, or enjoying one of the brand’s retail offerings from a supermarket.

How the PizzaExpress Club delivered delicious results

PizzaExpress achieved remarkable results through its industry leading loyalty program, including improved email engagement, higher customer retention, and more personalized marketing. These collectively contributed to a highly successful and customer-centric business strategy.

Through the new loyalty app, PizzaExpress has been able to vastly expand data collection capabilities. With an impressive 2.8 million members in only three years, it allowed the brand to gather important information, including preferred restaurants and dietary preferences of customers. This data became the foundation for PizzaExpress’ innovative three-tier loyalty programme spanning across pizzerias, delivery and collection services, and supermarkets.

Reforming the customer journey

PizzaExpress recognised the need to revamp its omnichannel offering. Strategically moving away from its previous mass-discounting strategy, the brand focused on two key objectives:

1. Establishing a robust loyalty scheme
2. Prioritising delivery and collection services

To achieve both objectives, PizzaExpress partnered with Mapp Cloud. The brand’s goal was to capture and leverage key insights and data through a loyalty app, enabling it to offer personalized experiences to customers.

Customising personalization through the PizzaExpress Club

In its retail offering, PizzaExpress implemented unique QR codes on supermarket pizzas, which alongside earning Pizza Stamps for customers, also ensured seamless offline data capture and a seamless integration into its customer data strategy.

In PizzaExpress’ innovative loyalty app, it offered omnichannel functionality to enable customers to not only book tables, but also make payments. The app’s stamp system propels customers through three motivating tiers (Bronze, Silver and Gold), each with its own tantalising, immediate rewards. To streamline omnichannel customer journeys and digital engagement within these tiers, PizzaExpress leverages Mapp Cloud.

The real-time integration of this valuable data into Mapp Cloud empowered PizzaExpress to initiate interaction with customers through personalized communications, encouraging a response. For example, customers close to reaching the gold tier may receive messages like, “You’re only one Pizza Stamp away from going gold!” and these automated communications, including welcome emails, birthday greetings, and abandoned cart reminders, significantly enhanced the customer experience, to increase engagement, sales, and revenue.

Through seamless data accessibility, PizzaExpress now extracts data-driven insights with precision. For instance, the brand can readily identify silver-tier customers who favour pizzerias in the north of the country and reward them with tailored incentives. This smart, insight-led approach has proven highly effective in driving revenue and customer loyalty.

An integral part of is the partnership is leveraging Mapp Intelligence across both the mobile app and website to truly understand what the consumer is looking to achieve in that session. By tying up in session contextual data with rich audience profiling, PizzaExpress can better personalize their communications and automate their marketing. A further benefit of this rich first party data audience understanding is the ability to create a more efficient ad buy and retargeting strategy.